The 2022 League of Legends LCK Spring Tournament is just around the corner, and T1 and Gen are currently the most promising teams to win the LCK Spring Championship. In addition to the paper strength of the two teams, The Korean media recently evaluated T1's hidden ability: the ability to cultivate new players in horror.
The following is the Korean media evaluation:
T1 is known in the LCK division for its terrifying ability to train rookie trainees, and there is a saying in the industry: believe and sign T1's rookie players. Because of this, many players who have gone out of T1 have received generous professional treatment.
Most of the players in the T1 team's starting list for the 2022 season are cultivated by themselves. Zeus, Gumayusi and Oner will play alongside Faker and Keria in the new season. Canna, a single player trained in the team last year, joined the NS team during the transfer period.
In other divisions and teams, there are also many players from the T1 club. The 2021 World Champion single Scout, who served as a substitute for Faker, later joined the EDG team.
Effort, who won the LCK title twice and reached the world semi-final stage.
Leo, the downside runner of Kwangdong Freecs.
Lehends, reached the LCK finals and the World Quarterfinals twice.
Aiming and Lava are also trainees at the T1 Club.
The reason why T1 is saturated with players in the 2022 season is also because of their ability to cultivate new talents. The club has so many good players. Even some of the more experienced players don't have the opportunity to compete with these rookies. That's why T1 opens their trainee trading market in the off-season and quickly finds a starting spot for several players: a win-win situation.
Even some of T1's main players have found new teams, with Canna, Cuzz, and Teddy all joining the new team. Clozer moved to LSB, Ellim and Hoit joined the KDF (formerly AF team) and Berserker joined C9.
However, aggressive player trades also led to such results, with T1's starting lineup average age being very low in the 2022 season, with an average age of 19.8 for the starting five without signing a new player in the offseason. That's still counting Faker (25 years old), otherwise the average age is 18.5 years old. That's quite young for a team that qualifies to challenge for the world championship title. Still, most of the T1 starters have made it to the semi-final stage of the World Championship, so it's too early to worry about that.
The upcoming Spring Games will test this team, and the 2022 League of Legends LCK Spring Tournament will begin on January 12, so let's wait and see how they perform.